Donald Trump has never been the people's choice

Pat Cunningham

Monday

Oct 9, 2017 at 4:17 PM

Someone whose name I didn't catch and whose blather mostly went into one of my ears and out the other said something on television the other day about how Donald Trump was “the choice of the people” in last November's presidential election. That little falsehood caught my attention. “Wrong!” I shouted at the TV. […]

Someone whose name I didn't catch and whose blather mostly went into one of my ears and out the other said something on television the other day about how Donald Trump was “the choice of the people” in last November's presidential election.

That little falsehood caught my attention.

“Wrong!” I shouted at the TV. “Wrong!”

As time passes — and as long as Trump remains free from impeachment proceedings — the fact that he lost the popular tally to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes will continue to fade from public consciousness.

Most people who pay more than passing attention to stuff like presidential elections are well aware that Trump “won” the election only because he carried the Electoral College. His popular votes were distributed among several key states in a manner that gave him the victory.

Mind you, I'm not going to resurrect my arguments against the Electoral College here. I concede that Trump was the victor under the rules outlined in the Constitution. No, I just want to remind Americans in general that this guy was the second choice among American voters in general.

Nor has Trump's popularity improved over the eight-plus months he's been president. On the contrary, his approval rating has been underwater in virtually every major poll since his inauguration — and it's declining. Currently, about two-thirds of poll respondents say they don't like the way this guy is doing the job.

The most amazing aspect of this situation is Trump's ability to pretend that the people love him. He occasionally hosts campaign-style rallies in friendly locales just to convince himself that he's popular among ordinary folks. He's even claimed that only widespread election fraud made it seem that Clinton carried the popular vote. But, of course, election officials in virtually every state — most of them Republicans — have categorically disputed that nonsense.

I think it's important to remind ourselves and our neighbors every now and again that Donald Trump is a second-place president. If we don't, more and more Americans will forget. More and more people will think that his presidency has been a consequence of mistaken judgment by most voters. But that's not true.

And let's not forget that George W. Bush also was a second-place president. He lost the popular tally to Democrat Al Gore by roughly half a million votes in the 2000 election. But Dubya prevailed in the Electoral College and served eight years in the White House. When he left office in 2009, his approval rating had sunk to Nixonian levels, and the nation's economy teetered on the brink of total collapse.

The moral here is that candidates who have won the presidency despite having lost the popular vote don't do very well once their in office.

Donald Trump is just such a president. Most voters didn't want him to begin with, and now we're stuck with him — at least until Robert Mueller and his posse come to the rescue.